Having spent a year trying to make their favoured opposition group, the Syrian National Council, into a government in exile, the United States and other western countries have abandoned these attempts and hammered together the unwieldy-sounding National Coalition for Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. It is barely a week old but, with schoolboy enthusiasm and indecent haste, France and, as of Tuesday, Britain, have recognised it as the "sole legitimate representative" of the Syrian people.

So is significant military assistance on the way? The common assumption is that the rebels must already be swimming in high-grade weaponry sent by their wealthy backers in the Gulf states and overseen by the CIA. Yet few journalists and fighters claim to have seen it. When I phoned him in the refugee camp where he's hidden away under Turkish protection, the head of the Free Syrian Army's military council, Mostafa Al-Sheikh, was clear. "The international community need Syria for the stability of the international system. They don't give us any support, and what support they do give us is corrupt or not worth having. What they're giving us isn't big enough to liberate one city, never mind the entire country."

Syria's armed rebels have no time for politics, but their judgment is sometimes sharper than that of their alleged political representatives. On 19 July, the same day the Free Syrian Army moved from the surrounding towns and villages to launch its assault on Aleppo, I met the head of its military council in the province, Abdul Jabbar Ekaidi. Unusually for a man leading an armed onslaught on Syria's biggest city, he was in a border town in northern Syria, desperately trying to source some ammunition. "We simply don't have enough weapons, and I refuse to send my men on a suicide mission," he said, adding that his men hadn't had enough bullets for two months. Then, as Syrians love to, he reached for a metaphor. "It's like delivering oxygen to a patient. They give us enough weapons just to keep us alive and no more; enough to attack the regime, but not to contain the reaction, which can be vicious. They [Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states] want to kill the Syrian state, not the regime. The result is that the regime is only weakened, which gives the politicians more room to negotiate." Over three months later and just as he predicted, Ekaidi and his men are vastly outgunned in a stalemate which is making Aleppo look more and more like devastated Homs.

The result is a puzzle in which some of the pieces are still missing. The military men are a little abrasive, but they have a point. Syria is very far from being Soviet-era Afghanistan and its rebels the new mujahedeen, thriving on foreign munitions. Ever since Bashar al-Assad's father, Hafez al-Assad, made Syria a cornerstone of regional stability, America and the west have had their uses for the Ba'athist regime; the early years of the "war on terror" saw Syria's usefulness renewed, as it received al-Qaida suspects from the CIA and arranged for their vigorous interrogation.

There's no doubt that the Muslim Brotherhood is using its connections in Turkey and the Gulf states to get weapons and intelligence to its favourite rebel brigades. But despite all the rhetoric from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, what's startling is the lack of heavy, hi-tech weaponry. In the 1980s anti-communist mujahedeen were soon taking delivery of the most advanced equipment that could be bought by the Gulf states and America: ground-to-air Stinger missiles were so plentiful in Afghanistan that the CIA spent decades afterwards trying to get them back. By contrast, some of the rebels I met in northern Syria were still shooting at helicopters with Kalashnikovs – or getting beaten by Turkish border guards for trying to smuggle in night-vision goggles.

The truth is that, with its authority weakened by the war in Iraq and its nervousness about radical Islamism, America really has no clue what to do about Syria – and is leaning more firmly than ever on its regional allies to act on its behalf. Its remaining proxies in the Middle East, the Sunni Gulf states, are keen to give Syria's secular institutions a kicking, but their main concern is control and the avoidance of contagion. In a region that is only at the start of a historic process of change, democratic "blowback" from Syria might destabilise their own autocratic monarchies. Their primary goal isn't to topple the Assad regime but to jockey for regional position – and keep a lid on the Arab spring.

The state department and others are surely right that the Syrian opposition needs a much firmer political platform. But it must come from within the country, and not in return for lukewarm international support. Syrians of all political stripe agree on more than they think – it's striking, for instance, how much of the country's administrative state is still functioning in rebel-held areas. Another thing most Syrians agree on is that their country has tended to become the butt of other countries national interests. If the Syrians now realise they're on their own, that their cheerleaders in the Gulf are merely toying with their indigenous revolt, then their goals might take longer to achieve and have to be less militarily ambitious – but they're more likely to be successful in the long run.